Nuclear war breaks out and Voldemort casts a spell to stop time. He and Harry alone are left to defuse the missiles and prevent the war. Voldemort’s radiophobic. Oh joy. LVHP. Spoilers for HBP, none for DH.

(Author's note: The details of nuclear physics, warfare,
etc., presented in this story are not intended to be especially
accurate.)

It was the third day, and I had given up trying; the third day after
Dumbledore's funeral should have taken place, and hadn't. I'd
found nothing that could alter what had happened, nothing to explain
why everyone and everything in the world had frozen between one
breath and the next. The sun remained fixed at eternal morning, the
ripples on the lake were immobile; I had found the centaurs stopped
in mid-hunt in the Forbidden Forest, the Muggles mid-shop in
Dufftown. I cast Specialis Revealo and the answer came from the
atmosphere at large, restating in a different language what I already
knew: Tempus Stabat.

"Why is tempus stabatting?" I asked the silent castle. "Why?"
but there was no answer.

I had eaten my way through a good portion of the food that lay,
permanently fresh, under the knives of the motionless house-elves in
the kitchens; I had discovered that the toilets wouldn't properly
flush, and that the only solution was to go round the castle using
each one in turn; I had found that getting a good night's sleep in
mid-morning sunshine was very difficult, but I hadn't found any
explanation of what was happening. All right, someone had cast a
spell to stop time; but it hadn't stopped me.

So, the third day, and I had lost my resistance to the agony of
waving my hand in front of people's faces and seeing their total
lack of response. During the first hours I had gone round the castle
approaching everyone I could think of, McGonagall and Slughorn and
anyone with any degree of authority or knowledge; I had shaken them
and prodded them and shouted, but nothing had happened. So, as I say,
I had stopped doing that. I was curled up at Ginny's feet where she
sat preserved in the middle of eating breakfast; not moving or
speaking, and trying my best not to exist at all, just to wait until
all this was over, one way or the other.

And it was over; I heard the front door bang.

000

Walking matter-of-factly down the hallway, robes swishing briskly,
was Voldemort.

I was too distracted by the sudden, excruciating pain in my scar to
form a proper plan. Pulling my wand out, pointing it at him with a
wildly shaking hand, I said in a voice that was half a scream, "DID
YOU DO THIS?!"

He seemed only very mildly surprised to see me. He Disarmed me
without a word, and I ran maniacally towards him with the intention
of throttling him with my bare hands; but he Petrified me and, to my
dismay, I found myself frozen to the spot like everyone else in
Hogwarts. I thought, "That's it, he's going to leave me here, a
statue, like everyone else. I'll be here forever." The horror was
unspeakable.

Then he played an irritable little tune by rapping our wands
together, and said "When you've quite finished trying to kill me,
Potter, we have a world to save. Is there anyone else still animate
here, apart from you?"

He cast the partial Body-Bind, freeing my head and shoulders to let
me answer, but all I managed was an ear-blasting, window-shattering
scream. Voldemort quickly put the full Bind back on again.

"It's easier to read your mind, boy. Not to mention quieter...
Nobody here apart from you, I see. Why you should have resisted the
stasis spell, I have no idea. Either you're benefiting from the
link we share, or I must have underestimated you significantly. Not
that it really matters..."

He conjured up a high-backed chair and sat down. "I don't want
you to start screeching at me again, so I'd better explain what's
happening. More or less the entire world... the planet, if you like,
is under a Temporal Stasis spell. I cast it in advance, many years
ago, to stop time. I set it to activate automatically in the event of
a nuclear war. That war has now started. The command has been given
to fire the missiles."

He started tapping our wands against his leg, as though marking time
to an inaudible tune.

"As you can see, a nuclear war would be somewhat... inadvisable,"
he said slowly. "And only wizards and witches of great power have
been able to ignore the stasis spell and move at normal speed.
Actually, I haven't found any others, not so far. So the two of us
now have the enviable task of locating all the British warheads and
deactivating them. That shouldn't be too bad because, comparatively
speaking, there's hardly any of them. What bothers me is the
possibility that the Russian and North American wizards have been
caught by the spell, in which case we'll have to do it all
ourselves. If that is the case we might as well just AK
ourselves in the heads right now," he said in an almost inaudible
voice, adding a very scary small smile.

"Do you get the point now?" he finished suddenly, looking up at
me. "I will unParalyse you, but you must not try to kill me. Or
Stun me or Petrify me or attack me in any way. I would also
appreciate it if you didn't scream."

He removed it, and I stood for quite some time with my mouth just
hanging open, tears parenthesising my nose as I battled the pain in
my scar. Finally I said, "You could be lying about the nuclear
war."

He gave a horrible, mirthless laugh, followed by a hideously cheery
grin. "I'll prove it to you, shall I, dear child? I'll remove
the temporal stasis spell (well, actually there are technical
difficulties with that anyway, but...), and the entire habitable
environment can be completely obliterated, and I'll sit back and
say, 'There! I told you so.' Why are you crying?"

I managed to gasp out, "Fucking hurts."

"What does?" he said impatiently, and cast some kind of
anaesthetic spell before I could answer. Blue, tingling magic fizzed
down the front of my face; blessed relief. I made my eyes point in
the same direction and tried to get my thoughts to do likewise.

"This could just be some plan to get me away from Hogwarts and kill
me."

Voldemort did an insane little dance of frustration in which he
swooped round with his arms aloft. I watched in nauseated
astonishment. "A, there is a nuclear war on, and B, why on
earth would I cast a temporal stasis spell just to get you
away from Hogwarts?!"

"Because you want to kill me!"

He stopped his dance and gave a hoot of strangled laughter. "Fuck
me, boy, I don't want to kill you that much!"

"Is it a difficult spell to cast?" I said doubtfully, privately
thinking that he must be telling the truth just because he was being
so weird, and that anyway I had no choice but to go with him for the
moment, because if I stayed here any longer I would completely loop
the loop.

"It took me most of 1956," he said sombrely. "Even I
encountered great problems. I began to think I wouldn't get it done
in time."

I exhaled uncertainly. "All right," I said, "so we have to
defuse nuclear bombs? What good am I supposed to be?"

"You can help me, boy."

"I'm only sixteen."

Glare. "What's that got to do with anything, fool?"

"I don't know about nuclear bombs," I said impatiently, "and
I'm not powerful enough magically to do much else, either."

"You are obviously powerful enough or you wouldn't have resisted
the stasis spell, not to mention having escaped death by my hand five
times," he hissed with a look of tremendous hatred at my having
made him admit it. "And I know perfectly well you're no nuclear
physicist, what I need is an assistant and general dogsbody. If you
don't feel up to that, you can just stay here."

As if that was any sort of a choice. I said, "Where are we going?"

000

Where we went first was a supermarket, in which Voldemort browsed the
aisles with an indifferent expression, placing cabbage and beetroot
in his trolley as though this were perfectly normal for Dark Lords.
As soon as I saw the beetroot I decided I would be better off cooking
my own meal. I gathered everything I needed for a full English
breakfast, and wandered back to the front of the shop to find that
Voldie had summoned a Primus stove and was indeed making borscht.

"Are we going to Russia?" I said curiously.

"Here's a stove for you," he said indifferently, conjuring a
twin Primus and a frying pan. "Don't disturb me while I'm
making plans."

Suited me fine. "I'll be in the sanitary towels section," I
said, and trundled off to the other end of the supermarket. While I
cooked my meal I had to ponder all sorts of odd factors, such as:
Where was the steam going? Why didn't the smoke alarm go off and
activate the sprinkler system? How come things we had touched defied
the stasis spell, but only briefly? And, What does this pump thing on
the Primus do? Ultimately, though, I was totally satisfied with my
cookery, and ate it with relish.

I trundled over to the newspaper section and was deeply disappointed
by the vast array of tits. The broadsheets seemed worried about the
situation in the Middle East, but I had thought that for just one
cataclysm the tabloids might have had the grace to put something
else on the cover. Oh well. I returned to the aisles, which contained
a small number of desultory shoppers. They didn't look the least
bit worried about the end of the world; did they not know it was
happening? My ignorance, I realised, was astounding. I wandered back
to Voldemort, who was stirring his borscht, and said "How come the
sirens aren't sounding?"

"Possibly because (a) the missiles haven't left their launching
pads yet and (b) the siren system was dismantled at the end of the
Cold War," Voldie said.

Fair enough. "Have you finished making plans yet?"

"No," he said dully, "because there isn't really any plan to
make. We find the warheads and, I suppose, Vanish them. I don't
know if you can come up with anything better?"

He seemed serious. I thought the question over. It was odd talking to
him like this; he was like a different person, a grey cardboard man,
and we were trying to save the world. I said, "I wish."

He frowned at the stove. "Vanishing things sends them to a pocket
universe from which they can theoretically be brought back. That's
not really what we want, although it's better than nothing. I
suppose one way of getting rid of them would be to send them to the
pocket universe and then detonate them."

"Bit shit for the pocket universe," I said.

"I was thinking that. We don't know what's in there. It could
be another inhabited planet for all we know; which would still
dispose of the bombs, but... and I'm worried that the walls won't
hold and the blast will leak back here," he added, which he plainly
considered to be far more important.

I had a feeling there was something I'd missed here, because it
seemed to me that bombs ought to have detonators; or, in the case of
those round black things in cartoons, a long piece of string with the
end on fire. If that was the case then surely all we needed to do was
separate the bomb from the detonator? I said as much to Voldemort and
was rewarded with a glare. His red eyes looked particularly strange
under the strip lights.

"Go and read a magazine or something," he said shortly, and
started eating his borscht.

000

"Where are we going?" I asked for the second time as he
extended a black-robed arm and pinned me to his chest with a grip of
steel. I knew we had to use Side-Along Apparition, but being touched
by him made me shudder.

"Lakenheath," came the supremely illuminating reply, and off we
went down the rubber hose; and even had he bothered to say "The
American Air Base in Surrey," I would still have been utterly
confused by my arrival in what looked like any old field, albeit with
a massive great road down the middle. While I was staggering in
drunken circles and trying to compose myself, he looked up and down
the road, shook his head, grabbed me and Disapparated again.

"Could you stop Apparating every five seconds?" I demanded,
reeling from the impact and sitting down hard.

"The runway is two miles long," he said tersely. "D'you
expect me to just walk down it?"

"What runway?" I demanded, just as he grabbed me and Disapparated
for the third time and I finally saw what he was on about, because in
front of us was a spiky, bizarrely streamlined aeroplane about as
high as a house and three times as long. A tiny, frozen bloke was
visible inside a bubble on top.

"Fuck me," I said, sitting down again.

"That's one of them," said Voldie in great triumph. "For a
moment I was thinking we'd missed them all. And still with the
bombs in the bay," and for absolutely no apparent reason he
suddenly Petrified me wordlessly.

I couldn't see what Voldie was doing very clearly. I stayed locked
in position and looked round at some very pretty Southern countryside
with fields and deciduous woods. The ground was rather wet. Then out
of the corner of my eye I saw his wand moving, drawing a complex,
glowing pattern in mid-air; a rather oddly-shaped pattern, really. I
squinted painfully sideways and saw that the lines were very wiggly,
which turned out to be because his hand was shaking.

"Dammit," he said. "I just can't..."

He erased the wiggly lines and drew new ones, and finally managed a
pattern that seemed to satisfy him; he finished the spell
non-verbally, and the whole of one side of the aeroplane suddenly
disappeared. I presumed he'd made it invisible. Just while I was
being fascinated by how little space there was inside, he unPetrified
me.

"What did you Petrify me for?" I said indignantly, jumping up.

"To stop you going near the aircraft, disrupting the temporal
stasis spell and making something terrible happen," he said,
rolling his eyes.

"Yeah, like I would!"

"Oh, very likely! You're a Gryffindor! Take one step towards that
plane and I'll do it again."

I stood and looked up at the half-plane. It had a small pregnant
belly, inside which were several long, white chimneys with little
wings.

"Is that the bombs?" I said, making Voldemort flinch.

"Yes, they are," he said harshly. "Now be quiet."

He raised his wand and pointed it at the plane. Then he took a
gasping breath and lowered it again. After a moment he tried again,
but his whole arm was shaking. I could see his elbow wobbling from
side to side.

I began to feel worried. Whatever it was that was affecting him, it
seemed obvious that this spell had the potential to go alarmingly
wrong. Like he might detonate the warheads, kill us both and destroy
the world, for starters. "Let me hold your hand," I said quietly,
very keen that he should not jump.

"Piss off, Potter," he snapped, still shaking.

"I don't want you to miss."

I gently put my left arm round his stomach; then I wrapped my right
hand around his bony wrist. (By 1997 I was only about a foot shorter
than him.) I was pleased to note that my hand didn't shake at all.

He didn't protest or move. He took a few deep breaths, his frail
bony arm now helpfully encased in a Harry plaster cast, and roared,
"EVANESCO!"

The white chimneys vanished. We waited several seconds to see if the
pocket universe exploded and took us with it. Nothing happened.

"Excuse me," Voldemort said politely, peeling himself away from
my grasp, and he turned aside and puked very genteelly all over the
grass.

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